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Listen to Richard Nixon's 'Checkers' speech

By the 1952 presidential election, Richard Nixon had succeeded in creating an image of himself in the Congress and Senate as a hard-hitting, uncomprimising, and ambitious politician. He was also a key political fixer, as even the epic biography by Roger Morris admits: "he was ... a part of secret and strategic deliberations at which his would-be [vice presidential] rivals could only guess." [1] After winning the nomination, Nixon quickly became a crucial figure in Eisenhower's "Crusade for Political Purity", as Morris describes: "Nixon should 'flail the Democrats' while the Presidential candidate remained 'above the battle.'"[2]

During the campaign, Nixon became embroiled in a slush fund scandal, when he was accused of using a political account provided by lobbyists to further an oppulent personal lifestyle. Facing rising pressure from the media and calls for him to stand down as vice presidential candidate, Nixon went on the offensive in his now famous 'Checkers' television speech. Item by item, Nixon detailed his modest earnings and property, including his wife's "respectable Republican cloth coat", then attacked his critics as communist agents. Although this was one of the most significant moments of Nixon's life, and a speech that has entered popular culture, none of his funeral orators - Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger, Bob Dole, Bill Clinton - make mention of it, nor of the anti-communism he continued to employ. 

Haynes Johnson points out, however, that "having saved his place on the Republican ticket" Nixon continued with his aggressive red scares. "He accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of suffering from 'color blindness, a form of pink eye towards the communist threat in the United States.'" The Democrat nominee Adlai Stevenson got a "PhD from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment" and President Truman and his colleagues were "traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation's Democrats believe."Billy Graham makes the claim that Richard Nixon "had a great respect for the Office of the President. I never heard him one time criticize a living President who was in office at that time", but here Nixon was literally calling President Truman a traitor.

This virulent anti-communism helped Nixon and Eisenhower win the election, and continued to form the general theme of Nixon's vice presidency until his 1960 presidential challenge against John Kennedy. With Eisenhower already ailing and disliking travel abroad, Nixon became America's defacto international statesman, visiting some 56 countries to promote United States' interests and shore up support against the spread of communism. As Johnson points out, Eisenhower was periodically disabled due to illness throughout his presidency, "and each time public attention focused strongly, and favourably, on Nixon as his successor." Although Nixon was still riding on the coat-tails of red-baiting, it was in this period as Vice President that he broadened both his experience in government and his understanding of world affairs, of which the latter would come to define his historical importance both as president and afterwards.
 

[1] Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1990, 685
[2] Ibid., 734

Listen and watch Nixon's 'Kitchen' debate with Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev

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